That Future Time

"It's a black and white world right now," said Liz. "It's like it's not the one we live in."

I saw the treetops etched into the sky and the stars reflecting on the water like little white flowers, and understood exactly what she meant. We were caught in a momentary Shangri La, a paradise that we neither understood nor deserved. In that moment, everything seemed to make sense. Not that we had somehow made sense of it, but that its truth had been laid out before us and no longer needed to be discovered or sought after. In a strange and inexplicable way, it felt like a foretaste of that future time when God will make His dwelling place among men. We could feel His presence in that clean, quiet place, and without asking we knew each of us felt the same.

There have been few times in my life when I have experienced pure beauty the way I did that night. The kind of beauty that is only made possible by God's glory being infused into everything in sight and emanating back out from it, "like shining from shook foil." Such was the beauty I saw then, not just in the hot springs and the mist and the forest and the stars, but in Liz and Allison and Leah and Lydia too. Christ truly "plays in a thousand places," does He not? And we are his masterpiece, his magnum opus, made in His image in a way I don't think we'll ever fully be able to comprehend.

I wish - how I wish - I could somehow recognize this beauty everywhere. It's there for the discovery, I have no doubt. But we humans are so dense and insensitive that it takes a starlit night in a utopia of hidden hot springs to inspire that kind of wonder in us. That we are able to experience it at all is something of a miracle. "What is man, that You are mindful of him?" Perhaps one of the greatest and most perplexing questions ever asked... what is man? We are nothing more and nothing less than the beloved creation of the God of the universe, called by Him sons and daughters.

If only we could love Him as He loves us, and love each other the same way. One day. For we are indeed "the possibility of love more deeply than we are cells." And there will come a day, perhaps not soon and certainly not here, when we will embody the love that is now only a possibility.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

- T.S. Eliot